The following series of words are usually a comedic take for what typically revolves around a series of letters, which are most often used to represent an acronym. The acronyms are, "MMORPG", "MMO," and "MMOG". They can stand for a variety of things, but in this context are, Massively, Multiplayer, Online, Role, Playing, Games. Get it? Good.

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The Stigma System (Archive)

You Had No Idea, Did You?

No, I’m not talking about the system Aion uses. As I might have mentioned before, I’ve recently been playing Champions and what began a quick play session has since transitioned into a self-induced addiction; that is not what I’m trying to convey. To some then this may appear to be a misleading non sequitur, however I will have you know it will tie in once I’ve gotten the rest of my ramblings out of the way.

If you recall, you may remember how the internet was set aflame time and time again as the Age of Conan and WAR audiences duked it out, both intent on destroying each other. This is not an uncommon situation, and it makes perfect sense that brand loyalties would develop from hype while fighting over a finite audience. As I observed the two communities, many insisted that they would never go to that other game. Again, this irrational hatred of their “enemy” MMO makes enough sense that you can think your way around it and accept the logic. This is of course at the same time while players angrily swear off the game that dared to make them so excited for the release, only to ultimately disappoint them. There they would write on and on about what the developers did wrong and tried to mislead us, saying they would never play one of their games again and would be hiring Jack Thompson to try and bring their game down; As well as sending letters to their congressmen to ban bad games like that one and put a curse on their building so every employee who worked on this horrible game would lose their first born and be condemned to the ninth ring of hell.

You Can Feel Their Malice

I do actually believe I could hear the sounds of children screaming every time I finished reading that post. I shudder to think of what the dark thoughts of Daikatana players must have been like. I would put in an image to try and display it, but I would no doubt actually be banned by the internet itself for crimes against humanity. Moving swiftly along, I now point out Star Gate: Worlds(Now confirmed dead) which has been classified as vaporware several times over, to which the team typically throws screen shots up at MMORPG.com to let them know they are (supposedly) still working on it. Commentary from the community was more or less consistent; People were unimpressed and ridiculed it for one reason or another, rarely actually pointing out what they thought of the graphics; Rather comments consisted of pointing out what an awful game it must be and how it should just hurry up and die. Then, on occasion someone might say they like the screen shots, followed by the ridicule of that person for having such an idiotic thought.

Again, while irrationally argued, there is sense to this. Screenshots typically mean very little to me, since they rarely show how good the game play actually is, or how well it runs. I can also wholeheartedly agree with the people who pound on Aion and AoC, who in their latest updates have been dancing around their issues of lack of content with fluff and marketing that typically equate to, “Look at the shiny!” as if they were trying to convince us we were not actually reasonable human beings. Instead they desperately want us to start to think like an ADD child who had been deprived of his Ritalin. However, the farther in we go the more frequent the inanity of the anger is, and we start to revert back to the beginning of pure hatred rooted in disappointment and the differing of opinions. What I find most surprising is the amount of backlash that comes from even positive news. When supposedly Age of Conan had fixed many of its bugs and added new content (Even going so far as to give people two weeks free to prove it,) people still rallied and shouted it down for having been such an awful game, and is made of lies. Not that they saw that it wasn’t true, or that they were skeptical, but simply statements of “It’s still a bad game” with only their supposed Spider-senses that allow them to know when something is full of suck. On a side note, I have a similar ability to know when you are full of stupid.

I Can Tell When That Loser Is You

And don’t you forget it! It was actually just today that I read up on what are most likely to be the next set of additions to Champions, and most things I read were pleasing. In fact, the latest update was on trying to put in more things that the game was criticized for; lacking group content and lack of endgame. And yet, although that is the official goal (along with mastering the feel of being a super hero) I still see seeping anger and dismissive posts, actually demanding that the only thing the game can do is shut down because the game has no end-game and there is no group content. To that I ask, “Um, what?” Desperately I searched for the reason I could be reading so much stupid. Not even Age of Conan had garnered such concentrated desires to see that it simply end. Did they even read the article? Ultimately, I had to conclude that actually, none of these posters could read. In fact, they just happened to be illiterate and accidentally ended up on MMORPG.com, and in their attempt to find what they were originally looking for, had instead managed to, (by pure chance) end up on the forum thread for the article and accidentally typed in complete sentences, blissfully unaware that instead of exiting they were writing something horribly ironic that reeked of stupid. Therefore, I should hold nothing against these individuals and instead I should feel bad for them because they have such rotten luck and managed to say something that would allow intelligent human beings to look down on them since they are not guaranteed to be as understanding as I am.

Is stigma so strong that we only believe in what’s convenient to our current thoughts, and anything else to the contrary is actually just a lie? Brilliant.

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One comment on “The Stigma System (Archive)”

Champions was one of a few games I spent multiple months playing after I ended my WoW subscription back in 2010. The character designer is second to none. Even when I felt a bit of a grind coming, I enjoyed rolling another character just to spend an hour creating one. Do yourself a favor and only buy things in the cash shop that are not free to subscribers.

On the point of your post, I work with guys that will write a game off as not worth playing with little more than an offhand comment disparaging some minor aspect. Of course, later when I talk to them about enjoying a game, they’ll admit if they hear something about that sounds cool.